Chapters 1 to 3: Tollington, a lie and Anita — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Chapters 1 to 3: Tollington, a lie and Anita
The plot, part by part
What you need to know
Meena's walk of shame with Papa to Mr Ormerod's shop, the first picture of Tollington and of the Kumars as its only Punjabi family, and the seventh-birthday outing she remembers,
and her first steps into Anita Rutter's world: the yard Anita rules, the neighbours Mrs Worrall and Hairy Neddy, and the gap Meena sees between Tollington's ways and her family's.
Key quotations: 'I'm not lying, honest, papa!', 'A row of terraced houses clustered around the crossroads', 'gap-toothed smile', 'hop of optimism', 'as constant as the moon and just as remote', 'the odd one out', 'the first time Anita had ever talked to me', 'near death experience', 'like a gun', 'vision of decadence', 'like a friendly potato', 'expected Tollington stance'.
Structure: an opening that drops straight into the action, then digresses into Tollington and its people before returning to the shop, as Meena moves between past and present.
Context: a mining village of terraced houses and fields where the Kumars are the only Punjabi family, and a child who notices how her family's garden, food and ways stand out.
OCR's 2023 comparison: Meena's memory of choking on a sausage on the drive home from her seventh-birthday outing, comic and alarming at once, and the examiners' warning against reading her parents as neglectful.
Quotations are short phrases of a few words, the way you would learn them for a closed-book exam.
OCR's question on this text has two parts on the same text. Part (a), 20 marks, compares a printed extract from it with an unseen extract of the same genre, and weights your response (AO1) and context (AO3) twice as heavily as language analysis (AO2), where context means the social and cultural situations you can infer from the two extracts and their introductions; an answer on only one of the two extracts cannot go above Level 3. Part (b), 20 marks, explores another moment in the same text from memory, with response and analysis of language, form and structure (AO1 and AO2) equally weighted and no marks for context. Each worked paragraph and exam tip is labelled with the part it is for.
